Landscape with the Finding of Moses

Claude Lorrain painted Landscape with the Finding of Moses around 1639, depicting the biblical scene in which Pharaoh's daughter discovers the infant Moses in his basket among the bulrushes of the Nile. The Nile is rendered as an Italian river landscape, and the Egyptian setting is merely suggested by costume detail. Claude's treatment reduces the narrative — the discovery of the future liberator of the Israelites — to a small human episode within an expansive landscape of trees, water, and luminous sky. The finding of Moses provided Claude with a perfect vehicle for combining the sense of discovery and tender human encounter with his preferred compositional format of extended landscape recession. The painting is one of five commissioned by Philip IV of Spain in this period.

The sweeping river vista is bathed in Claude's characteristic golden light, with carefully layered planes of trees and architecture creating a measured recession into the luminous distance.